Tips: Convince leaders to innovate with technology

A persuasive leader must be skillful and clever while employing clever tactics in order to persuade others. You will learn 3 simple tips in this article with BEMO about how to convince your superiors to deploy new technology, making work more convenient and modern.

1. Support from colleagues

Have you ever heard of “contributing the wind into a storm”? Most leaders will listen to more employees than to just one individual in a collective environment. Seek approval from colleagues or subordinates to increase the pressure and easily convince your “boss” to pay for a technology “reform”.

By proposing together, business leaders will be aware of the problem and will be able to accept the innovative solutions employees propose. The tactic for successful innovation investment is to involve your mid-management colleagues. These people understand employee activities as well as gaps in the work system. At the same time, they also have a voice over the staff level.

2. Convince by the value that technology brings to businesses

The investment value of new technology will cause leaders to withdraw their “wallet” when they see its return on investment (ROI). In order to highlight this benefit, you should provide desirable growth numbers or a successful governance process that increases the excitement of senior leadership in your proposal.

When persuading your superiors, you need to show two values:

• Tangible value: Provide leaders with data that can be utilized to optimize revenue, administrative costs, market share, or labor efficiency.
• Intangible value: When convincing leaders to innovate, intangible value is important when evaluating the benefits. It is possible to improve the intangible aspects of work and evaluation by increasing customer satisfaction, increasing the morale of organizational members, or improving transparency.

Take the time to gather data from businesses that have successfully used this software and how it has improved them before presenting your idea of technology innovation. From there, you can choose the right benefits to convince the leadership.

For example, if you want to propose a change to the operating process using ERP, you can use the success figures from PNJ. They increased sales by 190%, profits by 630%, and job hopping decreased by 1-3%. Talking numbers will stimulate leadership to rush to deploy new technology.

3. Revealing the eloquent instinct

Even if you have all of the above tactics, you will fail if you lack oratory skills.

To increase your persuasion, you can apply a principle from Aristotle, which has been learned by world leaders like Warren Buffett. The philosophy of the philosopher Aristotle has three aspects:

• Ethos – The proponent must show a clear purpose
• Pathos – To increase success, the proponent needs to understand who the audience is? What factors touch their emotions?
• Logos – Persuasion will be enhanced when the proponent presents clear, factual evidence that is relevant to the current situation.

It looks like you need to take the following steps:

• Make sure you are the person who is involved in these activities on a daily basis, so that you can compare the effectiveness of applying technology to the problem.
• Next, you need to address the emotional component, such as current employees facing pressure or difficulties with manual processes. As many difficulties as you can from the collective opinion are brought out in this step, as it will affect the leadership’s psychology of action.
• To conclude, you should provide success data from large corporations, or competitors in the same industry, on how they have used technology to reduce costs and grow.

Here is a small example for you to better understand the principles of Aristotelian rhetoric. It is easier to persuade leaders if you update each step in the presentation in detail.

Your department or business can now confidently submit a technological innovation proposal based on the three suggested factors above. When the technology is deployed, leaders should use financial metrics to prove their proposition is right.

In addition, you also need to always hone your persuasion skills in communication to improve your ability to persuade others.